When I finally reached a white ribbon of sidewalk that ran alongside Leslie Street, the intensity of the sun reflecting off it nearly blinded me. I held my hand up to shield my eyes, looking left, then right, trying to determine which direction might lead to our new home. I turned left.
People outside of Canada, so accustomed to hearing about blizzards and ten-foot-high banks of snow, can never quite believe it when you talk about the thick wall of humidity and the sheer, still scorching of a southern Ontario summer. It is an oppressive type of heat. That day the combination of burning sun and suffocating humidity walloped me like a punishment. And then there was the eerie silence. Aside from the odd car whooshing past there was not a soul about. It was as if the entire city had been placed under an evacuation order.
Beneath a punishing amber sun, I walked for fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, I am not sure how long, with no idea of where I was going. A car horn honked from the other side of the road. Stranger danger. I ignored it and kept walking. I heard car tires squealing as the car did a sharp U-turn and sidled up beside me. Warily, I turned my head toward it. It was my mother.
“Where on earth have you been?” she shouted across the front seat toward the open passenger window. “Why didn’t you wait for Mrs. Austin?”
“I did wait. She never showed up. I stood waiting, even when no one was around.”
“She was there. Your brother was there. He can follow instructions. What is wrong with you?”
“I was there! I stood where you told me to wait, and I did not move!” I slid sulkily into the passenger seat.
“You’re impossible.”
My irritated mother shifted the car into Drive. She continued her harangue, but there was a draft of relief in her voice, and I knew that she had been fraught with worry that something might have happened to me.
Her concern disappeared quickly as she brought me up to date: “We had a problem with the moving van—the driver refused to cross the old bridge, and so they had to bring in three smaller trucks and all our furniture had to be moved into them and then taken up to the house. Imagine! I was fit to be tied. And then one of the construction workers dropped a beam on the fridge, so we are going to need a new one.”
None of what she said had much meaning for me. This “house” was a mythical place at that moment, though she spoke as if I should know it intimately.
“And in the midst of all that I had to drop everything because you went missing.”
I turned toward the passenger window to ignore her. A small voice rose inside me: “This is how it will always be,” it said. “You will never be able to rely on anyone but yourself.”
The pile of schoolwork clung to the sweaty dampness of my dress as we drove on and on, past unfamiliar territory. Presently, we arrived in a barren landscape of newly paved streets that were alive with enormous dump trucks and gigantic diggers that thundered all over the place, kicking up clouds of dry dirt like monsters hunting for something to eat. Our car slowed down, and my mother broke the silence: “Here we are.”
I got out of the car and looked up at the house. My mouth dropped open. It was the ugliest, darkest, most forbidding place I had ever seen. It looked like something from a horror movie. The bricks were dark, blackish red; not straight, linear bricks, either, but of various shapes and sizes, some blooming with black bulbous appendages, like hideous tumours. Worse, as I was soon to discover, the back of the house had a turret shaped like a witch’s hat.
When I spun around, the house’s setting arrived like a second shock. We were surrounded by a dust bowl of new-built homes lined up in tidy arrangement and in varying stages of construction. Our house sat on a slight rise, giving it prominence on the landscape and also emphasizing its incongruity. How could my mother refer to this as a “new house”; it was old, a ruin. We had moved from the modernist vibrancy of Don Mills into something out of Little Dorrit. Shame and embarrassment flushed my face.
“This is called the ‘Henry Farm subdivision,’” my mother said as if instructing me in a new lesson. “Our new home was the original homestead when there was a farm here. It’s called ‘Oriole Lodge.’”
I did not care. I stomped sullenly behind her up the steps to the front door and wondered whether she truly comprehended the definition of “new.” This house was anything but new. It was simply awful. Even the ancient-looking cedar trees we passed seemed to agree; their long, limp branches hung like arms in a state of resignation.
Where the hell were we? I paused on the steps to look back at the neighbourhood, trying to reconcile the two extremes: behind me was a scary old house of dark bricks and dark-green, peeling paint; in front of me, new roads meandered around the contours of the rolling landscape, with miles of cables, copper tubing and wire, and concrete pipelines banked up along the roadside. The heavy, sun-saturated air pulsated across an oasis of brand-new homes. Why could we not live in one of those instead of this monstrosity?
I looked up pleadingly at my mother, hoping this was a joke, or at the very least a stop on the way to our real new home.
“I hope they have the bathroom working,” she muttered, ignoring my expression. She flung open the front door to the chaos and din of a building site, but before I walked in, she grabbed my shoulder and spun me around to face her hard eyes: “There are workmen here. Act polite.”
Schoolwork still clutched to my breast, I waded through clouds of plaster dust, tiptoeing around strange tools and building debris, dodging a jungle of exposed wires that hung like venomous snakes from wall holes and ceilings or that slithered up from behind the baseboards.
When we arrived in the room that was set up as our kitchen, I headed over to a large table and finally emptied my exhausted arms. My mother immediately plucked my report card from the pile and with one sweep of her arm sent the rest—a year’s worth of proud artwork, test results, poems, and essays—into a garbage can.
“But . . .” I wailed.
“We have no time for that. Look at this place. We have got to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”
For the rest of the summer that is all we did—my father, mother, brother, and I. No day passed without a list of chores. One Saturday morning my mother led me through the dark-panelled library hung with glass-fronted cases that held my parents’ beloved collection of books. At the opposite end of the room a pair of glazed pocket doors opened onto a small, round room of almost floor-to-ceiling windows. It was the middle section of the turret at the back of the house.
“This is called a ‘conservatory,’” my mother explained. “It is used for growing plants.”
We were not able to actually walk into the room because at least four feet of dirt impeded our access: it covered the entire floor and completely blocked the door to the outside.
Misreading my confusion, she said, “No, they do not grow them on the floor. Someone obviously did not look after this room. In Victorian times, a conservatory was used for cultivating plants, especially over winter. And it was where the lady of the house might recline and have her tea. Can you picture that?”
The room looked as far from being a place for a lady as you could get, but I knew my mother craved to be that lady.
She handed me a shovel. “Your job today is to dig this out. You are going to have to first shovel the area in front of the door so that you can open it and throw the dirt outside.”
I spent the day digging and digging. It was a big job for a nine-year-old, but in our house we did not dare question our parents or their methods. Hard work was the ethos by which we lived. By late afternoon, my excavation work had uncovered a waist-high cement trough that encircled the entire room; a cast-iron radiator; a couple of plant stands—one of white wicker, the other of wrought iron. There were loads of discarded pots and fragments of pots along with trowels and other gardening implements. The big discovery was a floor of terracotta tiles, all intact. This delighted my parents, and they brought me a pail of warm water and a scrub brush to clean it. My work was rewarded with
an ice cream cone.
On the days when I was free to play, my brother and I and the clutch of kids marooned with us in this subdivision in the middle of nowhere roamed the houses under construction. We peered into poured grey concrete foundations, tested the strength of the joists supporting the subfloors, bounded up staircases that led to roofless levels. We wandered through rooms of wood framing, probing the wiring and piping that would soon be covered with drywall. It was like viewing skeletons awaiting skin.
Back at our home we lived amid the renovations, working alongside a small crew of tradesmen who thought my parents insane for saving such a relic. The notion of renovation had yet to be embraced by the wider world, but my mother took to it naturally and instantly, as if she had been born with the knowledge and capability to undertake it. She had no prior experience or tradition with such things: her parents’ simple bungalow was never altered, nor was it particularly decorated. She certainly did not have the plethora of house porn that exists today to inspire her or egg her on. Yet, she stick-handled the renovation and the subsequent decoration like a pro and was fearless among tradesmen.
By fall the house was complete—a remarkable achievement given its condition at purchase and its size. Originally, the house had seven or eight large bedrooms, but under my mother’s redesign there were now four bedrooms, plus two playrooms—one for my brother, one for me. Two smaller bedrooms, thought to have been servants’ quarters, had been made into a bathroom. My bedroom had views over fields of tall grass stretching like a Saskatchewan vista to Highway 401. Back then it was only a four-lane highway (as opposed to the sixteen lanes it is today), and my brother and I would sprint across it to explore the ravines and woods on the other side.
I got first dibs on the playroom and chose the smaller of the two: the light was better, and the floor was carpeted. Over the next few weeks I organized it. My own space. In one corner, I set up my Barbie dolls and created a home for them with pieces of small wicker furniture and the occasional small chair my mother found during her frequent haunts of the antique and junk shops scattered throughout downtown Toronto. Even Barbie, symbol of Swinging Sixties modernity, was not permitted to have new, plastic furnishings in our home. That Christmas, my grandfather made a canopy bed for my Barbie, and my grandmother made the bedding: bed curtains, lace coverlet, linen sheets, pillow, and pillowcase. I wept with disappointment that the bed was not the pink plastic Mattel version from the Barbie catalogue, but I grew to love it.
My Barbie nook organized, I got down to business and set about drawing a home for myself. I held an obsessive fascination for Ethel Kennedy and her eleven children, and I decided that I wanted a life like hers. I designed a horseshoe-shaped home with twelve bedrooms—one for each of the children (I was going to have ten, and I named them all), one for my husband and me, and one for guests. All I needed was a husband, but finding one was the least of my worries. I was not interested in boys, but I was obsessed with designing my home. A box of Smarties, the contents spilled on the floor and arranged in colour-coordinated pairs, became the inspiration for the outfits I sewed for my dolls, and the mood board for the decor of each room in my dream house.
In the Henry Farm house, I began erecting walls of my own and became out of necessity a solitaire. Without a nurturing mother, I pined for nurturing friends, but the disruption of the move, of having the previous structure of friendships and agreeable playmates torn from me so bluntly, had shaken my young foundations. I trained myself to be inconspicuous to avoid my mother’s spasmodic attention.
“Go make friends,” said my mother.
How does one “make” friends?
“You just walk up the street and introduce yourself to whoever you meet.”
She made it sound so breezy, like drawing breath. But meeting new people—putting myself “out there,” as she referred to it—terrified me. I was frightened of rejection. Friendships had occurred so organically before; now it was something I had to “do.”
Our house did not help my search for new friends. Potential playmates were too frightened to call on me and play inside. It looked like the home on The Addams Family. Not surprisingly, given its unusual appearance smack dab in the midst of a new housing development, the house—and our family—became a side show. People slowed down when they approached it; stared at it. If I was playing outside, they would stare at me, too, wondering what kind of child, what kind of people, lived in a house like that. Even when I was nowhere near the house, adults singled me out, whispering, “Her parents live in the old Henry Farm house,” which elicited nods of understanding, though what they understood precisely I could not tell. All I knew is that our family was viewed as an oddity and an anachronism. The perception was not entirely incorrect: outside our home the world was in bellbottoms and miniskirts; inside our home we were strapped into metaphorical corsets.
My mother courted this distinction. She was in her element. She was already a minor celebrity as a columnist for the local newspaper, and her “rescue” of a home slated for demolition, one that was discovered to be the homestead of a former premier of Ontario and his early-settler relatives, had bestowed new prestige on her. To her credit, it is entirely due to her efforts that Oriole Lodge is still standing and that it was eventually designated a historic building by the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario.
In short order, my parents’ lively Saturday-night parties resumed. My father crooned along with Frank Sinatra on the hi-fi and shook up the martinis; my mother passed platters of canapés and dips as she regaled her circle with anecdotes about our unusual house. She loved to talk about its history, and spiced up her stories with the mention of ghosts—a subject that had her audience transfixed, agape, and looking uneasily around the room. One such story was this:
Oriole Lodge was built by Irish settlers Henry and Jane Mulholland in 1806. Henry was bullish on Canada and what this vast frontier had to offer, and he made several trips back to Ireland to entice others to emigrate. On May 11, 1833, on his voyage back to Canada, The Lady of the Lake, the ship he was travelling on, struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank. Fifteen passengers and crew survived. Mulholland was not among the lucky ones. According to my mother, Mrs. Mulholland was on the veranda of this very home at the time of the disaster when she saw in the distance her husband on horseback riding up the driveway. She called to her children that their father was home, and they came running out of the house to join her. They waved to Henry, who waved back, and then he vanished into thin air. Word arrived soon after with the tragic news of his drowning. Whenever my mother told this story, I would notice the women quietly draw their evening wraps tighter around their shoulders and migrate back to their husbands.
The Mulhollands’ grandson was George Stewart Henry, a farmer and a lawyer. In 1898, he brought the homestead back into the family’s ownership, and lived in the house for the rest of his life, even while serving as Premier of Ontario from 1930 to 1934. A strong proponent of expanding the province’s highway system, he served as Minister of Highways before his premiership. It is either ironic or fitting that the largest and busiest highway in North America runs right behind his old home.
In 1958, George Henry sold his estate—the house and 460 acres—for $2 million to a development company. He died ten days after the sale was completed. Two years later, building began on a suburban enclave that would be known as the Henry Farm.
George Henry’s ghost and those of his relatives appear not to have moved out when my parents moved in. The house positively crackled with ghosts. Oftentimes, I had to pause when I heard a voice or a sound to discern whether it came from my parents or from a ghost.
These were no subtle manifestations. One evening, a din arose upstairs—a wild racket of yelling, knocking, and banging, like furniture being thrown around by someone who had gone berserk. Tucked into bed, I heard it distinctly. My mother, who was downstairs in the kitchen, heard it, too, and called to my father, “John, what on earth are you doing? You’ll wake
the children!” My father, who was upstairs, called down to her, “I hear it, too, but it’s not me.” My brother and I sprang from our beds and stood with our father at the top of the stairs, looking down at my mother at the bottom of the stairs, all of us listening to this cacophony and screaming coming from the ether. And then it stopped abruptly. We stood for a moment looking at one another, and then without a word we trundled back to what we had been doing: my mother to cleaning up in the kitchen; my father to reading in their bedroom; my brother and I to our beds. That is how we dealt with ghosts: no discussion, no questioning; we accepted them and went on with our lives.
Darker manifestations than ghosts had begun to pervade our lives.
My mother had grown increasingly tyrannical and restless, as if possessed by an inner disturbance. Inside the house she was a bundle of barely suppressed fury, dark-brown eyes darting from one anxiety or desire to another, frequently exploding with a volcanic temper. She became a compulsive buyer of antiques and curios, often of a religious nature. She came home one day with a pair of large brass candlesticks and a monstrance that she claimed to have saved from a church that was being demolished. No one I knew had altar candlesticks and a monstrance in their home. She fretted and fussed with the decor and the arrangement of furniture, and while she had beautiful taste in all that she did, it seemed to be compensating for a deeper anxiety.
One source of discontent was me. She was hypercritical of my appearance, once slumping on the edge of my bed and wailing, “Why did God give me such an ugly daughter?” We never had real conversations: everything was a scolding, and any passions I expressed were deemed an affront to her curated realm of Minton china, majolica pottery, and lace placemats. She was driven by a furious, seemingly insatiable aspiration, hurrying to make something more of her life, to create the perfect home, the perfect life. All that stood in her way were two stubborn children and a psychologically needy husband. The irony is that home imprisoned her as soundly and completely as any addiction can. Perhaps there were money problems to which I was not privy, though my parents were in no way extravagant and nothing was ever bought on credit: “the never-never,” my father called it. Only the ring of the doorbell would return my mother to a model of gracious ease and sparkling wit.
Open House Page 4
